Tuesday, November 30, 2004

what dan does instead of leaving his desk at lunchtime

I was wondering how the arguments went yesterday.  This article doesn’t inspire much confidence in me that wisdom will prevail.

Shiver Me Timbers

Growing up in the ‘burbs, my bike was my escape pod.  If I pedaled hard enough I could clear my mind of petty complications and all the aching sameness in which I felt myself enmired.  And if I was sufficiently goal-oriented, I might even get somepleace.  But, since it was the valley in the 70s, there really weren’t very many places to go worth going: a bowling alley, the community college, a record store. If I pounded as hard as I could I could climb up to mulholland, but other than the famous view* there was nothing else up there. 

(*: I have no idea whose pictures these are, but they are coming in very handy here.  That Mulholland series was right along my standard training route when I was in high school, that’s just where I’d have been going if I wanted to bike as hard as I could.  Which I usually didn’t.)

Really, if I wanted a destination worth visting, and reasonably within my range, my best choice was usually the mall. Fashion Square was an old-skool mall, built in the early ‘60s to provision a burgeoning postwar community.  It had the requisite fawncy department stores at either end, a long arcade of botiques and specialty stores, and one run-down diner: the Jolly Roger.  I was still pretty young when I realized that, other than its grinning skull-n-xbones-themed decor, the place was basically a washed-out dive with weak food, tired desserts and perfunctory service at best.  The excitement and adventure implied by its name was an empty promise.  Yet, I could get there on my bicycle without too much effort, and I could usually afford a dish of ice cream there if I was inclined to have one.  Sometimes when the boredom overtook me, that’s where I went and that’s what I did. 

So it came to pass one day when I was 14 or so that I hopped on the ol’ 12 speed and took a spin out to the mall for a little exercise, distraction and treat.  I parked, locked up, walked up and down the bland selection of shops, and then entered the Roger, where I waited to be seated pursuant to a posted notice.  And that’s when I noticed her.

Monday, November 29, 2004

Thankyouverymuch

Things went thankfully fine this long weekend.  We are now officially embarked upon the holiday season, with its attendant treacly muzak and adorable windowdisplays of ambiguous elves and chortling bearded older men in loosely draped clothes holding onto big knurled poles.  Now, before I get totally sick of the xmas cheer (already I’ve et too much candy, I’m a bit off my breakfast this morning), it’s a good time to look back on a truly thanks-inducing weekend:

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

ok?

have an ok thanksgiving

Tradition, Turnips, and the Meaning of Life

I was six, and living in England for six months while my dad studied the Bodleian incanabula, which basically meant he got to go into central Oxford every day for all sorts of exciting research in a cool seventeenth-century library while I did my best not to get beaten up by the first form locals at my little day school.  I didn’t have many friends in England but I hadn’t had many in the states so the loss was not of any great significance to me.  More meaningful by far was the loss of my cultural benchmarks - my favorite cartoons, cereal, snacks, and the other miscellaneous bits that made my life feel like it belonged to me. What I had instead wasn’t real life; it was just England.

The thing that surprised me most by having disappeared, the thing I didn’t think ever would, ever could disappear, was my holidays.  I hadn’t conceived of a world in which the 4th of July or Thanksgiving were not universally observed.  When July came and went without even a single punky sparkler, the foundations of my universe were rocked.  No matter that Guy Faulkes day was coming soon enough with all the rockets and roman candles I could set ablaze - that was a holiday for pikers, obviously a tardy and pale imitation of what I knew was needed but still was missing.  There was a tangible sense of cultural isolation as I found myself adrift in a calendar populated with fake festivals and goofball gaudies that meant nothing to me. 

October crawled past; days grew noticeably shorter and trees shed leaves as they might have done back home, but something was missing - something big, the whole reason for having October in the first place.  This was 1970, and Britain had not yet embraced Halloween as the universally adored carnival of latex and glucose.  I’d already grown to love the cheap plastic costumes, the crinkly orange bags that strangers filled with candy for me as I went from house to house by flashlight, the proliferation of cardboard black cats and styrofoam headstones - but these were absent for me that British year.  If anybody cared at all about All Hallow’s Eve, they took it far too seriously for a person of my tender years and secular proclivities.  I wanted trick or treats and goofy scary stuff and none was to be had, and this, more than anything else, left me feeling empty and bereft. 

For the last few days of October we took a trip up north to visit some friends of my parents.  They were nice enough folk in a nice enough town, but I recall very few of those ambient details.  My attention was not on what was there, but on what wasn’t - and my parents sensed my displacement and felt for me, wanted to fill the void my young soul mourned.  So there in a strangers’ little house in Lancaster UK, they made up a Halloween for me and my sister and our hosts’ kids.  We bobbed for apples by candlelight and ate candy indiscriminately; we raided the parental closets and tried to create costumes in which we raced around the house in a sugar frenzy. 

They even tried to make a jack-o-lantern for us.  The challenge was, we couldn’t find a pumpkin.  We couldn’t even find anything like a pumpkin, nothing close to appropriate for the job.  What our gracious and generous hosts found for us, instead, was an enormous turnip: white and bulbous, a subterranean tuber of questionable culinary value.  I knew pumpkins were turned into pumpkin pie, and pumpkin pie was tasty; I’d never heard anything good about a turnip, much less enjoyed eating one.  But that was irrelevant: we had the thing, and we were going to carve it up into a - well, not a jack-o-lantern, I suppose, since those were cheerful orange fellows; this Albian analogue would, at best, be a Terrance-lumiere or a Chauncy-lamp or some other British sort of thing.  But it would shed light and with it, the holiday spirit (boo!) for which I longed.

Turnips and pumpkins are both vegetables, of a sort, but there the similarity ends.  Pumpkins are essentially hollow shells, a structure lending itself admirably to lampmaking.  Turnips, on the other hand, are full of turnip - a dense pale root, humorless and opaque.  I remember my Dad and Mr. Fenton taking turns hacking away at the interior of that turnip, slowly hollowing it out, sweating and grunting with effort in that tiny British kitchen, until enough room had been opened inside it for a candle to sputter without being extinguished; crude eyes and a mouth were punched through to the empty core of the lugubrious root and when it was lit and the lights were turned out, I felt in my bones that a real Halloween had been given to me.  The kids we were staying with thought the whole thing bizarre but entertaining, and since there was candy at the end of it, they were more than happy to play along.  For them, it was weird, innovative, an exotic Americanism. 

But for me and my little sister, it was not an innovation but a resuscitation, the return of that which had always been and by rights should always be.  Halloween was back, even if in a strange new guise and even if only in our little borrowed house.  And because it had been reconstructed out of whole cloth and turnipseed, because of its very audacity, its being forged and launched in strange foreign waters, that Halloween was one of the best ever.  Since that night, I’ve always cherished the grafting of new traditions onto old, the evolution of my cultural traditions. 

I write this as Thanksgiving is hard upon us.  Thanksgiving has been, for me, for the past fifteen years or so, a time of great ingathering at which as many friends as could be crammed into the largest available apartment would carouse and revel until rendered unconscious by tryptophane, alcohol and communion with allied souls.  It has been, for me, a massive festival, a kaleidoscope of delicious food and exceptional wine and great conversation.  So many of us brought so much to eat we’d actually have two complete meals with a nap in between, and no dish would repeat from one meal to the next, appetizers through dessert.  Thanksgiving was always the blowout to end all blowouts, year after year after year.

Well, this year it’s going to be a little different.  Families are growing, or visiting, or calling our friends back to ancestral homes; there are too many places for too many of us to be for us all to be together again this year as has been our tradition.  So instead of having 30 or so people involved, we’ll have 11 - and two have yet to start kindergarten.  It’s going to be phenomenal anyway, even though it’ll be different than I’m used to - a new chapter, a new style, a new twist on an old tradition, and I am so looking forward to it.  We’ll still carve up a turkey, not a turnip - but the spirit of the holiday will be recast and renewed for me in a deep, essential way nonetheless.  There will be fewer of us but we will be closer and will party that much harder for it.  So have a happy Thanksgiving, whether or not you actually observe it; if you can, enjoy a new tradition this year, or do something new with the old traditions you’ve always enjoyed.  The only way things get better is when they change.

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

NOT PARANOID DAMMIT

it just occurred to me that I got three comments on Allegra and not one mention of the other stuff… I’m starting to wonder in my SELFDESTRUCTIVELY PARANOID mind’s eye whether anybody noticed there was that whole thing on the phantom space hand in the expanded entry?  Dude, for me, that was the point of the whole post.  But you people and your pharmaceutical fetishes, whatever.

Monday, November 22, 2004

Boxes

* Okay!
* Okay.
* So?
* Well, I need six of these boxes down on the fourth floor.
* But?
* I guess we could try to carry three each, or make two trips....
* Yeah, but?
* Yeah, maybe we could find a dolly....
* Heh - you didn’t bring me up here to tell me that.
* Yeah, no, I guess I didn’t… I guess I could do this myself with a dolly....
* No, I mean - What were you going to tell me?
* I don’t know… maybe I’ll still need some help if I can’t find that dolly.... or....
* Yeah?
* ...if they don’t let me use it....
* Brad, what were you going to tell me?
* I don’t know what you’re talking about.
* You were in that meeting, right?  That’s been going on, like, all day?
* Well yeah, sure.
* And you come out and come up to me all quiet and sneaky to ask me to come with you up here to get something?
* Yeah… well, no, I don’t think I was being sneaky....
* You weren’t being sneaky?  You were totally being sneaky, all low-key and speaking softly and all. 
* Alan, I’ve been in a meeting on marking projection strategies for the past 4-1/2 hours.  I wasn’t being sneaky, I’m freaking brain dead.  I just needed help getting this cardstock to the printshop and you were handy.  There’s nothing… um....
* Sneaky?
* Yeah, sneaky about it.  There’s nothing sneaky about it. 
* So this isn’t about sharing some kind of huge secret just with me?
* No… this is about getting some cardstock to the printshop.
* Yeah okay… I don’t think so.  You keep that kind of secret from me, you can just move your own friggin’ card stock.
* There is no secret.
* Like fun there isn’t.
* What, you want me to make something up?
* Yes.  Yes.  That would be preferable.
* Okay.  I’m being fired, but then rehired immediately as a contractor on payroll. 
* That’s better.  Okay, I can totally carry three of these.  Where to?

Viva Allegra!

This weekend was extremely windy.  I like the wind well enough; it sounds cool and moves things about; the only thing about the wind that leaves me less than happy is that it brings out lots of airborne crud that makes me sneeze.  This was the case this weekend, exacerbated by vigorous sessions of housecleaning in preparation for guests on Thursday.  All this led me to take stronger allergy medicine than usual - in addition to my little nose-squirt steroids, I also took a pill.  The thing is, these pills - which most people seem to take without a second thought, except perhaps thoughts of blissfully clear sinuses - get me pretty well stimulated.  My heartrate speeds up a little, I talk faster, I move faster; if I exercise, I perspire more, and more quickly too.  These allergy pills have a definite impact on me - not one I particularly dislike, but one I certainly notice. 

I used to take Claritin pills for my allergies, and every time I did I’d think of the Velvet Underground song “Heroin,” humming the name of the drug I’d taken to that tune as I sensed the drug moving through my system, making my heart pound and my energy level soar.  Lou Reed’s nodder’s anthem was a fitting counterpoint to my supercharged systems, slowing me down a little even as the soundtrack in my mind built to crescendos of jangly electric guitar and seismic bass lines.  “Claritin… it’s my wife, and it’s my life....” Yeah, good times. 

Well those good times have undergone a major change.  Our insurance company has encouraged (compelled) us to switch from Claritin to Allegra for lozenge-based allergy prophylaxis.  (I really just wanted to have the letters x, y and z all in a single phrase there.  Whoohoo!  Monday morning wordosity!) The Allegra pills work about the same as the Claritin did - both are effective in keeping my head clear, and both get me a bit worked up and agitated in a friendly, “let’s build an addition to your house” kind of way.  The thing that’s different now is that I don’t have that soothing mental “Claritin” soundtrack to keep me centered and cool, like Lou Reed always is.  Instead, I find myself with an endless loop playing in my head of the opening song to a children’s show from my youth, one that I never watched but whose theme I couldn’t escape - a “Sesame Street"-style show to teach spanish-english bilingualism, called “Villa Allegra.“ That song featured (typically hyperactive) children sing-shouting the name of the show, followed by the following catchy lyrics: “Laa la la la la la la la laa la la la la - villa allegra! ( - repeat until insane).”

Needless to say this has done VERY LITTLE to cool my overheated homeostatic systems and as a result I’ve had scattered thoughts and misfiring memories and notions all weekend.  I also slept very little last night, what with those damn kids singing like munchkins on coke till three in the morning.  Now I’m living without drugs (those drugs, anyway) and the kids in my head are starting to settle down for a nap, so I am almost ready to have a normal productive day.  However, what remains of my pharmaceutically-overdriven weekend is a house that’s already almost clean enough to host thanksgiving here (premature, I know, especially with Shedzo the dog and his feline friend Hairscatter still performing their insidious work enfelting our hardwood floors), and a few garbled notes in my little book.  Those notes are just going to confuse me when I compile my writings into a coherent opus someday, so I’m going to disgorge them now and let you struggle with them instead of me.

Friday, November 19, 2004

Heads Up

They are, apparently, back.  Screechers of song, chaotic flockers, scourge of the baldheaded: starlings are not native to California, or even to the U.S.  They’re the single biggest success of a 19th century experiment to propagate the birds of Shakespeare in the US of A.  Most of that breedingstock, released into Olmsted’s storied Central Park, failed and died.  But starlings did fine and spread from sea to starling sea, filling the air with their dense, almost viscous flocks.  Individually, starlings are undistinguished birds, barely bigger than a sparrow, with a sharp eye and dark plumage.  However, starlings aren’t often seen individually – they live in flocks and they flock distinctively, swarming and swirling, an airborne amoeba, pulling against the mass of themselves and twirling aloft like hot airborne taffy.  They’re visually fascinating.  Their song, on the other hand, is a shrill unmusical chirp; en mass, it’s the sound I’d expect from a rioting crowd of space aliens. 

Just down the hill from the bus landing at the TBT where I wait at the end of each day for my ride home, a few sturdy pine trees rise from an improvised latrine disguised as a bit of hedge and lawn.  One of those trees overhangs the spot where my bus pulls up for boarding.  I now reach this zone at dusk and the starlings are back in town, so as I stand and wait the air is pierced by thousands of screeching birds calling out their essence to each other and the heavens.  They pour in from the four corners to the tree over my head, hopping from branch to branch, secreting themselves for the evening among the boughs and needles.  I watch flocks swoop down, thousands of birds moving as one in a bulging, morphing mass, their chirping incessant, the branches overhead alive with the tiny leaps of tiny feet, the hover and flutter of tired wings… the sky above us is a rich deep blue, a heartwrenching hue against which the fluttering birds coruscate, the clouds they form stretching but not breaking, transparent yet opaque…

and with all this life, this sound and action, the colors and shapes and the cool dusk air and the sheer joy of flight and fellowship enlivening the air I’m breathing, the only thing I can think is, one of these days one of those damn things is gonna crap right on my scalp.  I could wear a hat, but I don’t.  I’ve been inside all day; my skin yearns for contact with the elements, the evening cool on my brow.  I’ll tempt fate.  And when the inevitable happens, I’ll have only myself to blame. 

Have a great weekend.  Keep your head up.

Thursday, November 18, 2004

bustin’ a lung

Hey hey hey my imaginary friends, I’ve been remiss so here’s some good news for those who care: my tiny new niece Delia has two lungs and they’re both working fine!  I’m especially relieved because the project I was working on to fix the problem looks more like another bit of anatomy - one that Deelie just don’t got, if’n you catch my drift.  If she goes and develops blue balloons, I’ll need to work on a whole different kind of project I suspect.  The work of an uncle is never done. 

Let’s hear it for healthy respiration!

Scarlet Woman

There’s some new handbills pasted up on my way from the bus station to work that are raising a number of points of attention and interest for me.  The handbills are normal enough in their medium: 8.5 x 11 inches, pastel colors (blue/yellow/pink/green), covered with hand-drawn block capital lettering, mostly in straight lines, mostly carefully rendered if somewhat juvenile in form.  There are just a few to be seen in the course of my three-block walk.  But the thickness of the lettering clearly transmits a seething rage that draws my eye each time I see one.  What I read there on such occasions is hereinbelow reported in its entirety exactly as written.  My notes and impressions are listed thereafter. 

SCARLET
THE WHITE WOMAN YOUS ALL KNOW.  IS WANTED IN OTHER STATES FOR ROBBERIES AND MURDERS.  A 25,000 DOLLARS REWARD IS ON HER. SCARLET IS A CARRIER OF AIDS SHE HATES THE BLACK PEOPLE.  SHE HAS GIVEN THOUSANDS OF BLACK PEOPLE AIDS SHE USES HER FILTHY MOUTH TO GIVE AIDS TO YOUS SHE HATES.  CALL IN AND GET THE REWARD OF 25,000. 

Points of Attention and Concern:

* I did not know about the robberies or the the malicious infection activities.  But I knew that Scarlet bitch was trouble the first time I saw her bust Mr. Boddy’s head open in the library with the candlestick.  Her description, though, as the “white woman” raises some disturbing and heretofore unanticipated questions about Mrs. White.

* I note an important advance in both grammar and the very nature of human existence in the first clause (it’s not quite a sentence but has such strong declaratory presence I can’t hold that against it):  We are asked to consider a woman “yous all” know.  It’s been my position for years that English sorely needs a second person plural, a “vous” to our ubiquitous “tu,” a way to distinguish this “one other person” from that “group of other people.” I’ve cast my vote for “y’all,” for reasons that need not be reiterated now.  But our anonymous author has gone one brilliant step further: he’s taken the standard pluralization convention of adding the terminal sibilant, and combined it with the more formal, uncontracted (protracted?) version of y’all - you all. “Yous all” stands out to me as, perhaps, the first ever example of the second person plural, plural.  It might even be second person squared.  Do you see where this is going?  It’s the intersection of differential calculus ("the fluxions") and sociology ("the bends").  Brilliant scientists will be able to use this principle to develop unintelligible and exasperating formulae that seek to explain the very nature of group existence.  And I was there when it all started.  Kind of makes me get misty.  Philologically speaking, I mean.

* Dude - THERE IS NO PHONE NUMBER TO CALL FOR THE REWARD.  Don’t be playing me, yo.  Email the digits and I’ll cut you in. 

Please feel free to report any bizarre or inexplicable handbills and circulars you may encounter to the Chucklehut and I will try to give them the publicity they deserve.

Wednesday, November 17, 2004

breaching the bounds of good taste

sometimes you need a little boost on a wednesday.  sometimes that boost won’t have any whiff of the surreal or bizarre.  today is not one of those days. 

getting it on with the clownette

tying one on

thank you for your patronage and for not overstarching my towel

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Photographic Memories

I’ve been too wordacious lately by half.  Here’s some mellow imagery to chill your wednesday.  Lots more words tomorrow, most likely.  Who can say.

I’ve got explanations of what these are supposed to be on the photo blog, linked to the left in the sidebar.  You don’t like it, I’ll give you your money back.

Domestic Bliss: Cats and Fruits

Here’s a little essay I’ve been promising some folk for some time.  Every time I’ve re-read it since writing in back in early October, it’s returned me to a very pleasant piece of my personal timeline.  And I’ve denied myself such pleasantries for long enough - so without further ado (heh), SHADOW’S BACK AND THERE ARE GUAVAS

Regular visitors to the Hut (or “hutulars") probably already know how I feel about visiting my friends Dave and Kim and their family: I like it just fine.  I eat well, drink well, laugh well, and sleep very well afterwards.  Even though we’re no longer living just 15 minutes away from each other in the same town, we see each other as often as we’re able and yet I always wish it were more.  And, in a sense, it now is more.  Their home has gotten both homier and more exotic.  Here’s how:

* Guavas: My initial mental image of guavas is from my summer idyll in Hawaii.  I learned to recognize the yellow treaclesweetsmelling orbs that littered the roads and paths, often crushed and split open with nubbly pink flesh spilling from their burst rinds.  I pulled a few ripe ones from trees to check the flava, so to speak; I was disappointed.  The pits were inconveniently sized - too hard to chew, too insinuated in the fruit flesh to be spat out; the fruit itself, though sweet enough, was paltry.  Guava juice: fine.  Guava itself: not so much. 

Well, when we got to D&K’s house not long ago their kitchen was redolent of sweet fresh fruit and their countertop was covered with little green handgrenades, firm spheres with a fluted protruberance at the end.  “Want some guavas?,” Kim asked.  “This bag’s for you.  They’re from the tree in front. The kids don’t like them.”

They looked different than the yellow zonkers I was used to; the fruit resisted the knife as I bisected one.  With a spoon I curettaged out some of the pale greygreen flesh.  It was sublime - sweet and juicy, a rich taste that filled my senses.  Yes, it was a guava, but not like Hawaiian ones - this was better, tastier, easier to eat and more interesting to the tongue.  The idea of local guavas delights me.  I wound up eating three or four of the small treats every day with my lunch for a week, and with each bite I was amazed anew at the exotic qualities of a place I think of as home.

*Shadow’s Back: At the same time, the wild wideness that for so long has been associated with D&K’s cozy domesticity has survived transplantation and now roams among new tracts.  When they moved in together into the little house on the hill, they each brought cats.  Those relationships evolved, as do all relationships with and among cats, but one additional feline was grafted into the equation by the house itself: a feral had attached itself to the cottage, and expected to be fed there.  Shadow was tiny and pitchblack with a notched ear.  She didn’t let anybody close enough to touch her - ever, but within those limits she was moderately social.  When I’d arrive for a visit she’d usually be out front, playing with the other cats; on seeing me, Shadow would give me a hard stare, a short yelp, and then she’d run away a short distance where she’d eye me with a combination of friendly camaraderie and healthy paranoia.  D&K continued the prior tenant’s habit of putting out kibble on the doorstep for Shadow.  Sometimes they’d open the front door on a dark night and see a big ol’ coon or polecat on the stoop having a nibble, but it was obvious that these animals knew they were interlopers - they were eating Shadow’s food, on Shadow’s stoop.  The wild housecat had claimed a piece of the house for herself. 

Dave and Kim moved last year and now they inhabit an awesome east bay bungalow.  They’re living the dream with two towhead tots and a deeply coffered diningroom ceiling.  Their two cats, enormous glossy specimens whom I consider close personal friends, managed the transition well; they just packed them up with everything else and then kept them indoors for a while.  But Shadow required a different approach: they got a trap from a rescue organization and, after several failed attempts, eventually got the wild kitty in a cage and hauled her across the bay.  Shadow cowered in the large wire enclosure as they navigated it into their basement, where they kept her for two weeks.  When they finally opened the trap, the cat stayed put - at first, but then eventually disappeared into the house.  I’d occasionally see her behind a cabinet, her yellow eyes, gazing out at me impassively from an impossibly narrow space; she apparently roamed freely at night, during which explorations Dave occasionally surprised her in the open. 

Then she just disappeared; weeks passed without a shadow of Shadow.  But then again she reappeared, outside.  She’d gotten out of the house and found a new neighborhood in which to secrete herself.  D&K went back to putting food on their porch; Shadow went back to living outdoors and unfettered.  When I visit them now Shadow’s the first to greet me as I approach the house, with a friendly yelp and a playful scamper to safety.  She is a wild domestic shorthair; moving her to a new home didn’t change that.  I’m glad she didn’t change, really.  I like having a friend who just isn’t domesticated at all.

Monday, November 15, 2004

Word

Lately I’ve been using this space to talk about big events and my small perceptions of them, and to engage in the sort of theoretical and political diversions that tend to make me think of myself as a thoughtful, sober individual well-suited to bear the weight of the world on my shoulders.  Well, here’s a wakeup call for chuckles: The world is bigger than Cleveland, and the human condition has more noble struggles even than elections.  This particular realization has taken a number of forms lately for me, even while I’ve been droning on about my recent experiences with the “protect the vote” process - a process that may have given the impression that I’ve been reliving those events since they occurred, which I tried to do but couldn’t - despite my best efforts to the contrary I was laughing at myself even as I tried to write feelingly about those days, stumbling into and across the continuing enormity and splendor of creation. 

Let’s shift from generalities to specifics: Nothing has been more poignant and meaningful for me in recent memory than the healthy, happy, exhausting but triumphant birth of my assuredly beautiful niece Delia over the weekend.  Delia is a six pound, 18-inch lump of tenacity and courage, and my sister Evi and her stalwart husband Scott are rightly very proud of her, as I am of them all.  And the lessons that I’ve begun to take from Deelie’s amazing journey into life have only begun - she’ll surely have much to teach us all.  The first thing I learned from her is how much strength can be packed into a tiny package (yes Evi, she’s tiny - your continuing recuperation, may it be brief, notwithstanding).  The second thing I learned from her is that you never know what you are getting in this world, or how you will wind up handling it: Delia was born with a tiny hole in her diaphragm through which her abdominal organs had penetrated, resulting in a chest full of intestines and a left lung that hadn’t gotten a good chance to develop.  Her right lung is doing great and she’s got great color and good grip and a totally solid attitude, and surgery yesterday rearranged her internals appropriately and closed the hernia.  Mother and baby are doing very well, thank you, and the prognosis is optimistic.  This baby has been through a lot already in her short life, and more will surely come as the years spin us past.  But she’s got a toehold on this life of ours and she’s going to work it for all it’s got.  Way to go, Delia.  Way to get me back into thinking about what really matters most. 

However, I am not unmindful of my promise made to you all last week about the contents of today’s post.  Maybe this is as good a time as any to take a moment out of the front end of a week that I expect will take months to pass, to share with you a few words that give me trouble.  Words, giving me trouble?  How could this be?, you axe yourselfs in consterpation.  Well, I answer with avuncular humor, sometimes I want to use a word that I just can’t get out of my mouth without a giggle.  These are perfectly cromulent words with appropriate social uses, and there is no shame in employing any of them.  Yet my juvenile brain forces me to think, each time I try to enunciate one of these gems, of something else that’s not the subject of the conversation.  Something that makes the precocious ten-year-old in me rock forward on his whoopie cushion and burst into peals of immature laughter.  Well, maybe peals of immature laughter is what the world is telling me it needs now.  There’s no reason, then, to put this aside any further: Chuckles is pleased, in a dour, grown-up way, to present at this time:

TEN WORDS THAT SHOULDN’T MAKE ME GIGGLE, BUT DO ANYWAY
(in alpha order - we’re not picking favorites here)

crampon: “You’ll need a bigger crampon if you want to reach the top of the mountain.”
crapulence: “I was free to wallow in my own crapulence.” (C. M. Burns)
dicker: “I’m going to dicker till she doesn’t know which end is up.”
defalcate: “He defalcated all over my private assets.”
deterred: “It floated in the pool and deterred the swimmers.”
masticate: “If you masticate very thoroughly you will be less likely to choke.”
penal: “He seemed proud of his penal infractions.”
probity: “I’ve had it up to here with your probity.”
rectitude: “It’s a wonder he can even walk with so much rectitude.”
titular (a Kel selection): “The titular chairman is my bosum friend.”

That should do it for now.  Have a crapulent monday and keep your crampons clean.

Friday, November 12, 2004

Cleveland Post-Mortem V: The Vote, and the Real Work

It’s been a long week, and I must admit I’m feeling pretty tapped out of Cleveland stories.  What’s left are moments, anecdotes, grousings about the Las Vegas airport and the general shape of the planet… it puts me in mind of the fact that my major task while volunteering was to clean the volunteer headquarters and haul their garbage to the loading dock. 

I’d hung around looking for something constructive to do for most of the day; I was expecting to have to defend democracy actively, to insert myself into the fray as poll watchers and poll workers and disenfranchised patriots struggled with their circumstances - I was there to correct the problems, to clarify rights and to cleanse the process like an exterminator cleans silverfish out of a rectory.  Well that’s not exactly the kind of cleanup they wound up needing me to do.  When I arrived at my first monitoring station, the republican poll watcher told me frankly that he intended to lodge no complaints whatsoever - he just wanted to keep his eyes on the ballot box to make sure nothing untoward happened to it.  At my second assignment, the pollwatchers chatted with me about how smoothly it was all going, considering the number of voters, first time voters, and voters there with kids - all of which seemed, to me, to be a ringing endorsement of the process.  Bring those voters out of the woodwork!  Help them when they don’t know where the door is, what to do there, how to make their voices heard!  The newer they are to the process, the easier I’d like it to go for them! 

And that was especially true when I saw two, three, even four generations coming to vote together - grandma with her walker, leaning on her grandson, while the middle generation is carrying a toddler over the puddles, the child too young to belong to anyone but the grandson.... and all of them are peering curiously at the political signs, at their neighbors greeting them in the rain as well as the strangers backing them up; they’re checking out the democratic slate and they’re very interested in the occasional bag of chips or cookies we distributed to people who might be waiting in line for a while… even when the voter was a tough young thug with capped teeth and a streetwise grimace on a grizzled chin, when I stepped up and asked if everything went alright inside, he’d give me a curt nod and a minimal twinkle, an eye-to-eye exchange that none of the others could have seen that told me, “yeah, it was weird but it was cool and now its done so later on holmes;” and in each of these cases I’d done nothing - the system had become self-executing, they were all doing fine without me.  I’d learned all about HAVA and provisional ballots and rules for enfranchised felons and for people who’d moved between precincts versus between counties versus between addresses within a precinct… my stalwart timbuktu bag sat on a concrete tire-stop, shedding rain like a champ, full of legal references and the tools of advocacy.  I stood beside it on the blacktop, soaking up the rain and basking in the process that was unfolding before me.  The cameraderie of those who stood there with me was a pleasure, to be sure, but an ancillary one - the real pleasure was in seeing the people just walk up and vote and then walk away again, smiling, assuring me that they had exercised their franchises freely and without undue interference.  And I got to stand there and watch them do it, watch the mechanism operate before my delighted eyes. 

Eventually I was instructed to stay at my assigned station until the polls closed, to make sure no one was left out; I hustled the last few stragglers through the door with minutes to spare and the polls closed without closing anybody off.  I was then asked to stick around to see the ballot box removed to be taken to the Board of Elections, but instead the BOE van arrived in our parking lot.  A fellow volunteer learned from her that 24 other polling places were going to bring their ballot boxes here, and they’d all be taken downtown together - a process that could take hours.  We phoned this information to the volunteer headquarters and they told us to come on back. 

By the time we got to the bullpen where the main effort had been coordinated and conducted, the command-and-control center, if you will, it was crammed with volunteers who were randomly shucking off waterlogged paperwork, cellphones, sacks of snack food, umbrellas, clipboards, any number of campaign items, and the floor was a warren of soggy cardboard boxes and piles of tshirts.... the main job was obviously controlling this tsunami of garbage and laundry.  A few sharp folk were working on the problem; I asked how I could help them and got some marching orders.  I broke down ruined boxes and stuffed garbage bags with recycling and actual garbage and I got a dolly and used it to haul garbage out of the offices and over to the loading docks.  I probably stuffed and hauled 25 big bags of refuse and waste.  Once we were done the place looked well-used, but not like a typhoon had hit it, which was how it had looked when I’d arrived there earlier in the evening.  The work was done, all that I had been able to do. 

There’s a Korean priest of the 14th century named Naong, who wrote: “Live like the wind and the clouds, and then die.” The election is over, Cleveland is behind me, and each morning brings a new set of challenges.  Next monday: ten unfunny words that make me giggle.  For now, it’s time to get on with life.  Or whatever we’re calling it these days.

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

Cleveland Post Mortem IV: Rainman

My first assignment on Tuesday was Bethany Christian.  “Who’s she?,” I asked the unsmiling volunteer coordinator.  He just pointed me toward an elderly man about to stuff a sandwich into his mouth.  “He’s your driver,” I was told.  “Give him this.” I was handed some mapquest directions and with them I interruped an old man’s lunch.  He drove me quite a distance, it seemed, into a well-maintained but obviously impecunious neighborhood; the polling place was in a church on Martin Luther King street.  As we pulled up I noticed that the small parking lot was crammed, cars were threading in and out of the narrow drive, and there at that chokepoint between parking and street, between voting and the outside world, several election volunteers stood huddled against the cool breezes and steady drizzly rain.  There were clearly two species: a few Kerry supporters who distributed democratic slate guides, and several local proposition 112 supporters (to raise the sales tax for increased school funding) who seemed to know most of the people who came by to vote by name, nickname, and employment history. 

The Kerry supporters seemed to be in their early 20s, just out of college, earnest and articulate, friendly to a fault… there was a young man and a young woman who seemed to be good friends but not married (to each other); he was african-american but seemed out of his element in this neighborhood, she was a perky zoftig pastry chef, and very white.  The other Kerry supporter was an over-earnest young white man with big ideas about instituting his own form of barter to compete with the dollar, and who seemed like a serious political junkie; he wanted to join every conversation he heard and for most of the day had a serious hanging boogerchad in his nose. 

On the other hand, the 112 guys were a fun crowd - men and women in their 20s and 30s and a couple of guys who seemed to be in their 50s, who brought maturity and patience to the event.  They all were goofing on each other and having a fine old time together (except for one very lovely young woman who stood by herself at the edge of the driveway and who never seemed to utter a word or acknowledge any of the others, just handing out literature and looking as if she were aching inside).  They all wore sensible waterproof jackets and shoes and stood under umbrellas; occasionally they’d take a break in a big ol’ conversion van one of them had brought up alongside us with the door slid open so we could hear the soulful r&b sounds of democracy in action. 

The whole group of us moved around the small area where we were allowed to congregate, circulating and chatting, sharing the laughs when they were available, soaking up the rain when there was nothing else to do.  And I did a lot of that.  I was wearing a hydrophilic down coat, a nice business shirt with a classy silk necktie, suit pants, court-appearance shoes (as if, but just in case), a black smock that said YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO VOTE, and a hat knit for me by Amy Choppa.  In the steady drizzle the hat and jacket, being, essentially, wearable sponges, quickly became waterlogged, absorbing vast quantities of cold rain.My shoes filled up with water till I could feel my toes wrinkling into raisins inside of them.  Around 4 in the afternoon someone gave me a disposible plastic poncho and a soggy sandwich; it was like wearing a dry-cleaning bag and eating a sandwich in the shower, but I was grateful for them both.  Around 5 some additional EP volunteers were sent over to my station; I called HQ to make sure that I was where I was supposed to be.  They told me they’d send me to a ‘hot spot’ but it turned out to be no warmer than that first place had been.  It was full of people voting, and other people outside making sure.  They stood in the rain, and I joined them.

I was aware of absolutely no incidents or shenanigans at the polling places I monitored during my watch, thanks no doubt primarily to my prophylactic presence as I stood around in the rain and made sure that as many people as I could check had been able to vote without challenge or difficulty.  The winds blew and the drizzle drizzled and we congregated in parking lots in our wet clothes and our cheap tacky ponchos, laughing and observing and imagining a future we’d have helped to shape and encouraging each other and all who passed before us that the democratic process was alive and well.  We were aware of the dark skies, the gusting wind, the sheets of chilly rain.  How could we not be?  They surrounded us, clothed us in coldness.  Regardless, we laughed and cheered each other on, and we stayed warm enough.

A Hug Goodbye

A rainy day here today, and I’m off work for mysterious personal reasons.  A contempletive mood has crept up on me.  So here’s a recollection of what was, for me, the culmination of my trip to Cleveland last week:

Tuesday Night, November 2: by 9:30 or so there were only about twenty of us left at the community center down in the dark alley that served Election Protection as volunteer headquarters.  We were physically and emotionally drained, hoarse, barely dry from the day’s incessant rain, drooping, naievely blissful.  One of the locals suggested that we all dine together at an irish bar nearby; I was happy to be included in the dozen or so of us who caravanned over to eat and drink and watch results come in.  I had a Harp and a Newcastle and a lovely portobello gyro; I sat between a woman from New Jersey and one from DC.  The group of us together presented a disparate cross-section of liberal America, representing a broad reach geographically and philosophically, but all vibrating with election-day afterglow and the lingering burn of a hard job well done and the sheer pleasure of doing nothing at all for a few minutes. 

As returns petered in and our naievete seeped out the puncheons of the floor like so much guiness foam spilled by celebrating republicans, our group of 12 began to shrink.  The law student improbably claimed to have to do some reading for some sort of class; some folk had to go back to work the next day.  Soon it was me, the woman from DC (born in Cleveland and in her heart still there), and the local woman who’d first suggested that we go out.  We paid out tabs (that reflected a “you voted” discount of 10%) and were gathering ourselves for a final dispersion into the wet autumn night when the local began to tear up. 

She was a solid, responsible-seeming woman in her middle years, clearly intelligent and practical and down-to-earth.  And maybe she was just a little tipsy from the long day and the excitement and the two glasses of wine she’d just consumed.  But anyways she became a bit emotional and her voice broke and her eyes glistened with tears as she told us, as we took our leave of her, how deepy she’d been touched by our having come to help with the election.  She’s a lifelong Clevelander, one who loves her town and who loves to show it off, to show outlanders that Cleveland is beautiful, cultured, full of good design and good food and great people, that it is a great city and not properly the butt of ignorant jokes ... and to have strangers come from gleaming cities, coast to coast, to help and contribute to her city, to her Cleveland, for no reason but their dedication to a principle in practice… she ran out of words, and so do I. 

It really just felt like something I had to do, so I did it.  It’s hard to describe, but inside, it doesn’t feel like a big world event.  It feels very personal.  And at that one moment early in the morning of November 3, with those two tired friends I’d met just hours earlier, on the corner outside of the Old Angle Inn, in moonlight that lit the puddles that filled the empty street after the rain, hugging each other a goodbye all of us expect will last forever, the rest of the world didn’t really matter much anyway. 

More from Cleveland, in retrospect, tomorrow.

Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Cleveland Post-Mortem II: Ground Zero with a Cold Frosty Brew

Cleveland isn’t usually ground zero for much of anything besides the greater Cleveland area.  But last week was different.  Cleveland felt like a place where things were converging.  Bill and Stacy drove me from the airport to my first stop, a handsome old church where I’d be getting trained for the upcoming fracas; I tumbled out of their car with my suitcase in my hand into a crowd of many people working their way up the wide stone steps, many of them with suitcases too.  Everybody was coming to this place at which I, too, had finally arrived. 

On our way there we’d sped past preparations for a final downtown rally to be held later that evening; as I settled in at the training I got the details: Kerry’s last big campaign stop, with the Boss and the whole crew.  In Cleveland.  Where I was.  Back home in San Francisco, which flattered itself as a “world capital,” whatever the hell that means, I had not seen even a single television ad for either presidential candidate.  (Granted, I TiVo, but regardless.) There sure as hell wasn’t a free Bruce Springsteen concert at city hall to help get out the vote.  Here in Cleveland it felt as if the very ground upon which I walked was contested, and was that much more precious for it.

After the training was over I got a lift back to my hotel down near the center of town, checked in (after 14 hours of travel and classes) and then stepped out again to find a cold beer.  The streets were quiet, deserted, like most downtown streets are well after the close of business.  I strode out into their murky canyons and heard a muffled roar.  I walked toward it.  It resolved into occasional words, a chant, a cheer.  The rally.  I got to it just a few minutes before it ended, so I only heard Senator Kerry’s speech, and I was all the way at the back of the crowd.  But let me check that right there: I was suddenly in Cleveland Ohio, where the race was being fought the hardest, at 10:30 on the night before the election, listening to the candidate of my choice rousing us one last time to vote, with the vice presidential candidate and both their wives and their kids and the biggest name stars they could find on the stage beside them, close enough that I could see where they were, though not their actual selves; and the mood was electric, people crowding together, mesmerized, fascinated by the bright lights and the loudspeakers and the energy of the event, and there were sharpshooters up on the roofs of the big beaux art buildings around us, shuffling back and forth warily, and weird old men and excited young girls and pizza sellers and tshirt sellers and hordes of concerned citizens who were each aware - I could see it in their eyes - that we were all at the most important place we could possibly be, that for once, Cleveland was where it was really happening and it was to be taken seriously and respected even in the midst of the raucous chaos of the crowd… It wasn’t a matter of hero worship or a cult of personality, though we cheered and surged as if on cue when the right people told us to.  It wasn’t about fame; it was about a legacy.  We could feel the world’s eyes upon us out there on the broad plaza, watching to see what Cleveland would do, how it would acquit itself when called upon to perform on the stage of world events.  Within walking distance from my hotel.  Two thousand miles from my home.  After sixteen hours of nonstop action, the day before the election.  It felt historic - as if that night, those moments would be ones that thousands of people remembered and that made the days and years that followed different, maybe even better.  But regardless of that value judgment, of the way the world would spin them out, those moments counted.  I felt it. 

Later on that night I finally got my beer at the Winking Lizard Sports Bar: a Burning River Pale Ale with a shot of bourbon back, and then a wonderful Belgian beer I hadn’t had in a very long time called, improbably enough, Kwak.  It was served in a funkyweird glass, too, that fit into a strange wooden holder.  It was also delicious.  It had travelled a very long way to get there, to perfect a culminating moment.  And so had I, I thought as I drained the last drops from the vase-like glass and wandered back through twisted and unfamiliar alleys to my strangesmelling room high above Cleveland.  When I woke up the next day, the polls were already open.  And I was still at ground zero - a numerator that grew to ironic dimensions as the day and week wore on.

Sunday, November 07, 2004

Cleveland Post-Mortem: Eye Candy

Today will be my first of a handful of little essayettes on my recent trip to Cleveland as a volunteer with Election Protection.  Before I get too far into that, though, I’ll just link to this.  It’s a cheerful article about an alleged wide-scale “spoilage” of “uncountable” votes that has had the effect of shifting the outcome of the election, despite the effort to ensure a clean process at the polling places.  Conspiracy theory, or responsible journalism?  I haven’t yet made up my mind.  But in the meantime, I was actually there in Cleveland, Election 2004 Ground Zero, and some of my experiences there are ones that have sort of stuck with me even to this late date, so I’ll stick you with them for a while. 

Art: Cleveland had a cool project last year to have local artists do makeovers on fireplugs downtown.  My part of downtown Cleveland had the distinct look of a district that was contracting - empty storefronts, or a few tired shops on the ground floor of a once-distinguished mid-rise office block, now abandoned from the mezzanine up and starting to decay; these fireplugs stood before both gleaming and busy commercial towers and vacant shells with crumbling facades, and the busy street rolled by inexorably, and the fireplugs quietly howled their individuality in the diffuse fogfiltered light.  There were quite a few of these fireplugs and I didn’t see nearly enough of them, but I did take a few photos of them and you can find some of those in the photoblog, the link to which is to the left, finally.  These fireplugs seemed extremely hopeful to me, for some reason.  Looking back on the trip, they remain a detail that helps me look forward with optimism.  I have no idea why, but it’s comforting nonetheless.

I also got to visit the Cleveland Museum of Art, which is a really excellent institution with a very broad range of collections.  I saw some great ancient stuff, some cool modern stuff, and some splended stuff from the bits in between… But the place where I found I spent the most time really looking at the paintings, losing myself in my examination of them, was in the italian paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, just as perspective and verisimilitude were being perfected and integrated into the visual arts.  It was fascinating to me to watch the beautiful and rich but flat and iconic faces of medieval art being transformed, one development at a time, into the indistinuishability of a renaissance canvas from a live tableau.  You can see the steps, halting, unsure - here, the floor is painted in parquet to demonstrate the artist’s skill in showing it as a receding surface, but it looks strangely tilted and the furniture on it seems liable to slide off; the buildings in the background do not recede in space because they do not diminish in size as they get further away; the furthest window in the background is exactly as big as the closest one.  But the horses finally look real.  But the baby looks like a 70-year-old man.  But then in the next canvas, from thirty years later, the artist dazzles you with a floor laid with gorgeous marble that gleams convincingly in the false space of the framed environment; the baby really looks like a pudgy little baby, but the angel still seems to be suspended by wires and the wings will get more convincing soon too… It was a time of great promise when these paintings were made, but it was also a time at which things looked, to me at least, rather wrong a lot of the time.  The pre-raphaelites may have taken this notion to its illogical extreme, but their fascination with the era out of which greatness emerged is one that resonates with me as well.  I am grateful that I got to wander the halls of the Cleveland Museum of Art for a while.  It gave me the reminder I needed that perspective isn’t always something that even giants and geniuses figure out overnight, and in the meantime the interim product can be hard on the eyes.  Regardless, something good develops out of it.  Patience will have to become a learned virtue of mine. 

Have a great monday.  Don’t forget to paint your plug.

Friday, November 05, 2004

Suspicious

okay I’m moving from confused into suspicious.  (So suspicious that I even had to look up the spelling of suspicious because it looked wrong to me.) Dr Andy writes to tell me that the link I lunk on Oct 28 has been disabled - it’s a dead link now.  It used to lead to a little movie that raised some interesting questions about the attack on the pentagon on 9/11.  He asks if I have any comment about this.  I wonder whether it’s just a matter of loading a site up with users - Morford’s link to it must have generated a lot of traffic, it might have crashed a server or exceeded some sort of limitation or something.  That’s the benign explanation.  The evil explanation involves Tom Ridge, ether, and a sawhorse.  Anybody else got a conspiracy theory to spread?

Feels Like Home

I’ve finally gotten a decent night’s sleep and the world is starting to feel like I belong in it again, mutual warts and all.  I’ve loaded a few photos into the computer, cleaned up my inbox at work, and returned to my familiar chores and schedule.  I’ve been wondering how to share something of my experience with the blogging public - I wrote up diary entries that occupy 15 tightly written pages in my moleskine book, but even I find some of that stuff tedious upon re-reading it; it’ll be there when I need to see it but till then it makes more sense to me just to pick a few highlights to impose on y’all.  So here’s the plan: I’ll spend next week blogging about some of the more noteworthy and meaningful moments of my trip to Cleveland in convenient byte-sized bits.  “Fun-size” is, by the way, a misnomer - why is a candybar more fun when it’s small enough to lodge in somebody’s nostril?  They should call the little candy bars “rip-off” sized, and the “fun size” should be big enough to share among all the players at an intramural naked oiled Twister party.  Other attributes of “fun” and “sizing” are available upon request at the Chucklehut. 

And for the record, I’m taking down the paypal button.  I don’t need any more reminders of the loss, and I will never forget the support and help I received from this fantastic community, both monetary and emotional.  But now it’s time to move on, I suppose, and not in a .org sort of way.  Not for a week or so, anyway.  We’ll get ‘em next time, right?

Till then I’m going to try to catch up on some other stuff, but I’ll leave you with this: last week we had a big committee meeting to apportion some grant funds among several proposals intended to assist self-represented litigants achieve access to justice.  One proposal came in from a program that has a good track record and a very needy, under-served population, so it was received with much deference and attentiveness.  The plan was to set up clinics in the courthouse in the isolated south-east CA town of Banning, to help poor people with limited english proficiency manage their own legal cases.  Our advisor from the courts’ governing body was comfortable with the proposal so long as we changed the name.  How did I overlook the natural entertainment value of calling this project “Banning Civil Legal Access?”

I’d better wrap things up and get on with things.  I do have a lot of getting on to do today.

Thursday, November 04, 2004

Precap: Finding the Victory; Crossing Guard

I landed last night at 1:30 a.m., which my body sort of thought was 4:30.  I got home at 2:30.  The alarm went off at five and I got up half an hour later.  I feel like, how do you say in this proud democracy of ours, crap.  I think I’m supposed to have a pretty important conference call with a law school dean and a few of her top people at 9:30 - a call in which I will play the role of Ramrod Hardass, OGF.* My brain, meanwhile, is trying to escape out my earholes, while my stomach is engaged in a rousing round of “so you wanted a krautdog in vegas last night?”.  My hands are still significantly stained with blue ink blotches from a couple of those entertaining “pen responding badly to pressure changes in airplane” experiences, and I find my writing has deteriorated into the “chimerical references in quotes"** school.  So let’s cut to the chase:

I had a lovely trip and Cleveland is a terrific town.  I will get around to the details later, but I want to take this opportunity to say that many more people than I would ever have anticipated had a lot to do with this trip by clicking that pay pal button that I’ll be taking down tomorrow when the throbbing in my temples subsides.  (Typing, I can handle.  Coding, screwit.) And there were many many others too, who wrote me supportive letters, took care of me, boosted me toward the goal of going where I went and doing what I did.  Thinking this morning of all these dear friends, I gain valuable perspective on what has happened.  I am surrounded by generous and truly righteous people who have stood by me and cheered me on, and these people are not going away; they may have suffered a form of defeat but in a way there was a more important underlying victory, one in which a vigorously fought campaign culminated in a world-riveting day of judgment that seems to have gone, generally, procedurally, the way it was supposed to.  This will not go down historically as a good example of a “clean” campaign.  But it was a clean election, and that was really the most critical thing as far as I was concerned.  It was what I set out to try to help ensure.  In this very important way, I do think I helped accomplish my goal.  Me, together with my amazing and wonderful friends, some of whom are total strangers to me and to this site, who just liked the idea and helped make it happen, and who in particular fill me with gratitude and appreciation - we were at ground zero in the battle for democracy, and democracy won, and so did we. 

But there is one thing that I do want to get off my chest so I can go on with my day: the goddamn crossword puzzle on the airplane.  I usually don’t do those little puzzles but I just got a contrary whim and went and gave it a shot. Here’s a little insight into the Chuckle mentality: I will not leave a puzzle unfinished simply because I couldn’t figure it out.  Therefore, I worked that confounded thing for a long time, until I was just totally stuck, and then I started sneaking peeks at the solution.  (hey don’t judge me man i’m a free spirit.) So, it was a little irksome to find that they’d use the clue “menu” for CARTE, because there was no indication of language change as there had been in other such clues.  And “goose formation” and “repeated curves” were VEES and ESSES, which was totally cheating.  But maybe that’s the best they can do, so I would have cut them slack.  I’m a mellow dude, after all.  But then they actually used:
“Scramble the Arrangement”:  MESSORT.  Messort is not a word.  (Dorkwanks.)
“One Dimensional”: LINEAR.  Linear is, by definition, two-dimensional.  One dimension is a point, a point in motion is a line.  (Prongholes.)
So what I’m saying is, America West, your crossword totally sucked.  Airpuds. (The word “airpud” has been totally stuck in my head since I saw a place called the AirPub during my first layover (in phoenix, I think that’s where I saw this); their sign used a fat and sloppy font and was poorly painted and it totally looked like it said “AirPud,” and since then I’ve needed to call somebody an Airpud and now it’s been taken care of so I’m greatly relieved and can go on to work.  Thanks for listening, and for everything else.

*Outraged Grant Funder.
** Or footnotes.

Wednesday, November 03, 2004

Before the Deluge: B3 Recap

Before I leave Cleveland and get into my post-mortem and retrospective of my trip here (which was really very nice, mostly), I stopped off someplace where I could scam some free internet access and noticed that I left old news untold - so here is a brief sum-up of the B3 Summit at the GAMH.  The GAMH is SF’s oldest house of entertainment, a staid brickfaced building on a busy street in the tenderloin.  I hadn’t been there since the Project Object show where so many people got disoriented and horizontal, so it was interesting to see what it looked like on Friday.  The Summit was part of the SF Jazzfest, which draws a different crowd than did Estradasphere and the Zappa Allstars from Project Object - lots of hipsters in tight suits, “music buffs,” and other restrained-looking folk.  The floor was taken up with tables - all reserved, and not for us - so we ran upstairs just in time to miss getting a seat at the edge of the balcony.  All that remained were seats on the interior of the balcony, which is flat and wraps around the “house” about 20 feet above the floor.  This meant that, when seated, I could see nothing below the balcony, but at least I could stand up and lean over and see the musicians a little.  EXCEPT.  We were right over the stage, stage left (house right) and the organ had been placed pretty much directly beneath the edge of the balcony - so even when I could see the other musicians, I still couldn’t see McGriff or Wilson, the names that had brought me out in the first place, but who were literally right below my feet.  I’ve never been so close to the musicians I wanted to see and been totally unable to see them.  However, when I strolled around to the other side to see what I was missing, it turns out that both of them were rather boring showmen - they just kind of sat there, stroking the keys and occasionally grinning a little.  The guitars, drums and sax were a lot more fun to watch, and I got a pretty damn good view of them (especially Grant Green Jr and Pretty Purdie - two of my big faves anyway).  I recognized a few standard tunes in both sets but they didn’t play any of the stuff I actually knew from either of their repertoires.  Regardless, it was a fun and funky show, distinguished by the total passivity of the rather effete audience.* One guy in the front row caught our eye - a tall thin young man wearing tevas and a suit made of some sort of shiny silver fabric like silk - it looked like pajamas and he looked like a freak, sitting right in front as if he were proud of being so weird.  Some people look weird and carry it off but he just looked weird - period.  Mostly, though, I leaned over the balcony rail (with apologies, better late than never, to the people I was displacing (but really, they were all spread out over three times more space than they needed, people need to share the wealth goddamn it)) and nodded along with the very very mellow tunes.  It was a two-show night so the band shut down early (they had to go on again in less than an hour) - but then ran out to the back of the house to sell CDs, of which I got one from Mr. Wilson himself.  Upshot: good show.  Next up: Cleveland.  (Cue: ominous chord on the B3.)